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Jock blinked back tears and rolled himself into a fetal ball now that I wasn’t keeping him pinned anymore. “Don’t worry. They’ll find you.”
Chapter Seven
Part of me wanted to keep poking holes into Jock until he coughed up a name. But since he hadn’t talked yet, it would take a lot more work than I was willing to do to get him to confess.
I debated letting him run back to whoever it was that sent him, but in the end we settled for handcuffing him to a park bench. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have left a prisoner to rot, especially given how insane things were in the city. I made an exception for Jock, though, since he obviously had connections to the people in charge, and I wasn’t worried for his safety against the dead.
Well, not too much.
To be honest, if anything terrible were to happen to him—like if he were to slowly bleed to death from the hole in his arm, for example—I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
I was running out of fucks to give, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to spare any on a bottom feeder like Jock.
I did regret losing the handcuffs I’d taken from Keaty’s, but I hoped we wouldn’t need to lock anyone else up tonight.
“From here on out we just kill everyone. No questions asked.” I resheathed my sword as we continued our quest across the park.
“I can’t tell if she’s kidding,” Genie whispered.
“She probably can’t either,” Desmond replied.
I had meant it as a joke, but it was hard to say what I would do when push came to shove. The necromancers had to die. And if I needed to kill people to get the job done, I would. There’d been a time in my life I used to let the underlings live, but things had changed. I no longer believed being guilty by association was the same thing as being innocent. People chose to do bad things. They chose to align themselves with evil people, and they had to know death was a possibility.
So if it came down to it, I would kill whoever needed killing, and I wouldn’t feel bad about it.
Okay, I might feel a little bad about it.
I got the walkie-talkie from Desmond, and for the first time I wished we’d come up with some sort of team names or codes in case anyone else was listening in. “Hey, Keaty? It’s Secret. Uh, over?”
“Secret, is this an emergency? I have the distinct memory of telling you we should only use this frequency in emergency situations. Over.”
Nice. “Would you consider getting attacked by a thug who works for the necros to be an emergency?”
Silence.
“Over,” I added, rolling my eyes at no one in particular.
“I would consider that to be a potentially emergency-like situation. Is everyone in your group all right?”
“Yeah, we’re all fine, over.”
“And the thug? Over.”
“He’s chained to a park bench.” I looked over to Genie. Though the light around her hand had diminished considerably, it wasn’t gone altogether. Just how much bang for the buck could she use her power for? “Keaty, I’m not sure we should continue this plan. I think we should regroup. Over.”
When the radio picked up again it wasn’t Keaty’s voice, but Holden’s that came through. “Let’s cut this over nonsense. What the hell good do you think it’s going to do if we go back to the townhouse, hmm? You think we should sit around and wait out the storm there?”
The sarcasm in his voice bit me harder than his teeth ever had. “I don’t want to put anyone in danger,” I said quietly.
“Everyone is already in danger. This isn’t the kind of situation where you can protect us. This is bigger than you, do you get that?”
“That doesn’t mean we need to go looking for danger.”
“Secret McQueen doesn’t want to go looking for danger.” His snort came through loud and clear. “I never thought I’d live to see the day.”
A joke about his not technically being alive to see it sat heavy on my tongue, but I resisted the urge to say it. Holden was mad at me, and he had every right to be. If this was the outlet he wanted to use to express himself, I wasn’t going to take the wind out of his sails.
“Fine.” I had to try hard not to growl. “Please be careful, and keep your eyes open, okay? I think this is a lot more dangerous than we originally anticipated.”
